by Burton Hersh
“Same for the rest?”
“Looks like that. Lanthanum – that’s supposedly a catalyst they need to crack oil in refineries. Promethium is essential for nuclear batteries, if we ever get that far-- This batch apparently came from Camaguey.”
“And so forth.” He unfolded the map. It was of Cuba, with the site and the chemical symbol of each of the sites designated in red pencil.
It was hitting me. “Leases on the right properties could be worth billions to Sunrise Capital Partners.” It wasn’t nine o’clock at night, but suddenly I was afraid the next day was going to break at any moment. “Look, kemosabe, why don’t you find some envelopes and label them and pour an ounce or so of whatever priceless dirt this is into each one. Meanwhile, I’ll copy the letters and the map on that machine over there?”
Sonny frowned across at me, seemed on the point of saying something, then stopped. We got it done in under fifteen minutes. I stowed away a couple of the original letters, just in case. The rain had let up, and I was afraid the glimmer from our lights might alert somebody in the street. As we were sliding out the door Sonny slipped the battery back into the alarm system after cleaning it off with some disgusting form of handi-wipe, which he was taking to every surface we might have touched.
“Ten minutes after we get out of here the battery will have recharged itself. We’ll turn the telephone system back on while we’re leaving.”
“And that will be everything.”
“Almost everything. One last item. Fuck kemosabe. In our operation, you represent Tonto.”
The hour-plus of driving rain had washed most of the water-soluble spray paint down the door of the van; it whitened the soaked, glossy pavement. The rest came off with a can of solvent and a rag Sonny had left on the floor in the back; after that he took the rag to his cheeks where the whiskers had been and rubbed down my entire face. My eyes stung afterwards, mostly from the evaporation. We stripped off the coveralls and the hats. The latex gloves and the booties were already stuffed into pockets. Everything went into a large plastic shopping bag Sonny had brought along.
“Do you never forget anything?”
“Don’t butter me up. I’m still pissed.”
“Because I made a suggestion?”
“Those weren’t suggestions. Those were marching orders. The worst thing was, you had it figured.”
“I was really starting to get jittery again, I wanted to get out of there. Nothing more than that.”
Sonny tousled my hair and squeezed my scalp. “You done good,” he said. “It’s just that I’m used to working solo. Clean slate. Someday I’ll take you back to the reservation and we smoke a pipe together and we make you an honorary Comanche. You’ll have to come down with impetigo first, of course.”
“Do you have that?”
“Christ, no. We save that for the palefaces.”
Once everything was bagged I walked over and pulled the BMW out of the garage and picked up Sonny. It wasn’t that late, but neither of us was hungry. So we threw everything in the trunk of the BMW, and locked the van, and slept the whole thing off in the Holiday Inn off Route 41.
11
I paid for the room in cash. We had finished the complimentary breakfast by 7:30 and headed back downtown to return the van. Somehow I had assumed that we would just abandon the van on the street somewhere, but Sonny had that all figured out too.
“Leave a cold trail,” he told me. “If that thing goes back it means that’s that. No police report, no missing vehicle paperwork. It’s my guess she’ll be disappointed to see it in her yard. She’ll never get four hundred dollars for that winner the way it stands.”
Sonny was right. The cubanita confronted us looking decidedly let down, and counted out my two hundred dollars very slowly, hesitating over every bill.
I still wanted to look in on Dad’s contact at the Post-Dispatch. With what we’d learned from the evidence in Ramon’s safe I had a feeling we were already well ahead of the story. Since Freddy Wilmot covered the Cuban community around Miami day to day, I figured maybe he could provide some context. I called ahead and Wilmot said he could give me a few minutes.
Sonny waited in the visitor’s lobby while I went up to the editorial wing and located Wilmot’s cubicle. Many of the cubicles were empty. The ficus plant had died. Wilmot hadn’t gotten younger. His eyes looked cloudy. He was wasting away.
“How’m I doing?” he responded to my greeting. “Brilliantly. Welcome to the remnant of the Miami Post Dispatch. Where downsizing solves all problems. Six more months and I’ll be eligible for my ever more humble pension. That is, if one of those shitheads from personnel doesn’t polish me off first. How’s your father?”
“Still hammering away. He thinks he’ll have his big book on Keynes done before the end of the year.”
“Look forward to reading that. Lord Keynes is one of my absolute heroes. Took no prisoners. The guy could write a little too, know what I mean? I mean by that – for an academic. I read a lot of the Adam Smith thing.”
“I remember. You reviewed it.”
“Yeah. I guess I did. Also did a feature, right? On your father? Interviewed the shit out of the poor bastard, and how many phone calls? He was very nice, excellent. Listen, mind if I light up while we talk? I know, we’re not supposed to smoke in here. But look around. Nobody! Why not?” Wilmot lipped a cigarette out of an open pack and lit up.
“We appreciated the help we got with Ramon Cruz,” I said. “Dad was blown away by your background knowledge of the Cuban community in Dade County. We needed chapter and verse.”
“Nothing that out of the ordinary.” Smoke came out both his wizened nostrils. “That’s what we’re supposed to be doing, news, right? You really can’t help but pick up a ton of shit just living in the barrio down here the way we do. Not that I intend to dump on the Cubans exactly – my partner these days is of Cuban extraction.”
“What happened with—who was that, Humberto?”
“Jiminez? Picked up on that, right? Jesus. What a slimeball he turned out to be. On half the payrolls in town. Suck anybody’s johnson if the price was right. You really need to pick and choose these days.” Wilmot wiped his eyes. “What do you need now?”
“More of the same, basically. We thought you might be able to update us on Ricky’s father, Ramon. We’ve developed some business connections with his little hedge fund subsidiary, Sunrise Capital Partners. Right now there seems to be a lot of static on the line. We can’t quite tell what’s happening.”
“Static on the line. I like that. I’ll use it in my column today, if you don’t object. Ramon Perez y Cruz, correct?” Wilmot swiveled in his chair and called up Perez y Cruz on his terminal. “Strictly background, OK? The paper maintains its own raw files, but nobody is permitted to print any of this stuff without an OK upstairs.”
“Not a problem. I’m a lawyer.”
“The gist I’m getting is that the whole Sunrise Medical Ventures thing is shaky as shit. Ramon is a fairly smooth operator, compared with the rest of them – by that I mean the first generation, all those Brigade types. A lot of those nut cases scrambled around during their first years in Miami, and you know how many wound up working for the mob or the government or anybody who could provide a buck and maybe a pat on the ass during the Kennedy years. Mongoose, Watergate, all that shit. But Ramon as you know attached himself to Mas Canosa – there was a loose cannon – and little by little he went respectable.
”The problem with Ramon and a few of the others was that they came over to capitalism way too fast. Drank way too much Kool-Aid. Our finance guy maintains they were undercapitalized at every stage. The Bush administrations, here and in Washington, tended to baby them, and pretty soon they were dicking around with insurance and speculating in credit default swaps, which amounts to collecting premiums but laying off the claims— a high-speed con job, but involving a lot of paperwork. They ran out of assets a long time ago.
“Then at the last minute they saw that the b
ubble was getting ready to pop and started to scrounge for every soft touch with collateral they could dump in as ballast.”
“Soft touches like us.”
“Sounds that way.” Wilmot inhaled deeply. The cigarette was very short. “Then we started hearing rumors about how Ramon had something going on with his childhood buddies on the island. Exactly how or when or with whom we couldn’t exactly pin down. A thing like that could blow up.” Wilmot eased smoke out of one side of his mouth. “The kids don’t give that much of a shit, but the boat generation is still around, and if they ever caught Cruz going soft on Fidel those animals would hunt him down and introduce his head to his rectum. He must know that.”
Wilmot took a last, philosophical drag and snuffed his cigarette out. “ As I say: rumors. Nothing you could base a story on. Make any sense?”
“Too much sense,” I said.
* * *
I had expected that we would head west directly on the so-called Everglades Parkway – “Alligator Alley” – U.S. 75. But Sonny asked whether I would mind going back the way we came, Highway 41, and stopping off for a couple of minutes at the Seminole Museum on the Big Cypress Reservation, Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki, “A Place to Remember.” Savage Owl – Charlie – worked there. Sonny had promised his sister that he would look in on her three-year-old son and drop off a present.
The museum itself looked more like a storage shed or a back-lot warehouse: one floor, a long stretch of galvanized roof with a pyramidal entry portico. It was early afternoon. The exhibition area was close to empty – a middle-aged couple in cargo shorts looking over the diorama of an early Seminole village, some elderly tourists walking along a display case of arrowheads and pottery. There was a faint, herbal odor to the place, almost like an incense.
Sonny crossed at once to greet the heavy-set fellow at the cash register, who was loading change into the collapsible paper cylinders they give you at banks. He looked up, not wanting to be disturbed, his flat coppery features impassive. Above his jeans he wore a woven shirt of tribal design; he carried his elbows away from his body, like a Somo wrestler.
“This is Charlie Osceola,” Sonny said. “Who was married to my sister Linda.”
Charlie Osceola nodded slowly, several times: That much was true.
“Michael Landau here knows Linda,” Sonny said. “He’s her landlord at the moment.”
Charlie didn’t say anything.
“Linda wanted me to leave something off for little Carl,” Sonny said. He produced the package, neatly wrapped in brown paper. As if on signal, a three-year-old with a big bowl-shaped mop of jet-black hair ran in from behind the counter and embraced his father’s thigh. Charlie handed the boy the package, with which he scrambled around the counter and settled tailor-fashion onto the braided rug in front to tear the wrapping away from his present.
“From Dances-like-Fire,” Charlie informed the boy. The present was a toy fire engine. When Carl ran it across the rug it trailed a rich plume of multicolored sparks.
“You’ve got an office job now,” Sonny attempted. “How’s it going?”
“Hey, man, you know I’m into anthropology.” Charlie sounded hurt. “What am I supposed to be doing, hanging thatch on chickees and carving out dugouts? Come on!”
Once we were headed west again Sonny made an effort to explain. At the tribe’s insistence, for two years Charlie had been into a program. It made him cranky, not to say sullen.
“Maybe that accounts for it. I was expecting—“
“He’s a bozo, basically. He was a lot more presentable five years ago.”
“What I don’t understand is: How did Linda—“
“Get hooked up with him? Well, to start with, things were a lot different. Linda was still basically pretty adolescent. She was a big star as a teenager on the powwow dancing circuit. The troupe she was in put on shows from Calgary to Zurich. That means she missed a lot of her education, even in that ding-dong high school our mother put her in. Besides which she went around a lot making house calls with mother, who is a medicine woman.”
“Linda told me that.”
“Also, Linda is highly mystical. She thinks she communicates with ghosts, and spirits, and they will reveal to her the mysteries of the past and sometimes even what’s going to happen. Like Charlie there, she’s very susceptible to cultural fads.”
“That’s why they got married”
“It was in the air. Four or five years ago the Native America movement went through another round of Back-to-the-Wigwam craziness. Important to purify the race, that kind of thing – not that it ever lies that far beneath any of our feelings. Our mother was very strict, so Linda didn’t – how to put it – go with men. Very idealistic, in those days.
“She certainly seems to have – what – is matured the word? At least with me.”
“You must have something none of us expected. I told you, Linda has always been really stand-offish in those respects. Especially with whites. We think whites smell bad, you know.”
“Probably we do. But how does that explain Charlie?”
“Linda was around Florida that July four or five years ago performing in the various Green Corn Dance festivals and Charlie was a fairly big deal in one of their clans – Bear, I think it was. He was a bravura type – wrestled alligators, guided parties in the Swamp. Powerful – great build, lean, if you can believe that.”
“This was before the drinking?”
“During, but he was so active he could handle it. Linda’s ligaments were starting to give her trouble and getting married to somebody who wasn’t co-opted or too much of a breed or anything made sense to her. At about that point the tribe here sent Charlie up to Tampa Bay to consult on the Hard Rock Casino complex they were contracting just north of Tampa.”
“I’ve been there.”
“I can’t imagine what good Charlie was supposed to do in connection with that. Cultural detailing, I suppose. You know how it is – in big organizations, the stiffs make rank the fastest. ”
“I guess.”
“After a couple of years Charlie figured out that he was useless around the casino – no alligator pits -- and by then he was drinking a lot. Little Carl was on the way. Charlie quit the casino and the two of them moved into that place of yours for a while. Charlie finally gave it up altogether, and they separated, and Charlie moved back to the Swamp. Linda stayed put and wound up living with her cousin Alice and the dog.”
“Then I came along.”
“More or less,” Sonny said. “More or less.”
* * *
Once I got back to St. Petersburg I dropped out for a day before I contacted Dad. We met for lunch in one of the back booths at Howard Seltzer’s Steak House on Tyrone Boulevard.
“I picked this place because it occurred to me it would be harder to bug,” I explained once we had settled in. I was quietly surveying the surrounding tables. “After the Wallaye fiasco we don’t have any idea how extensive their support is.”
“I think you’re starting to terrorize yourself,” Dad said. Our mimosas arrived. “I think you may have watched The Bourne Ultimatum too many times.”
“You could be right. Right after we sat down I thought I spotted a nun positioning a shotgun microphone out of her rosary bag.”
We sat quietly, sipping on our mimosas. Dad didn’t say anything. Finally, and in some detail, I told him about our evening in Coral Gables and threw in Freddy Wilmot’s appraisal.
“Jesus,” Dad said after I finished finally. “My boy the burglar. You’re pretty sure you got everything? All the documents?”
“More than everything. Between the rare earth samples and the letters we ought to have everything we need to exert a lot of leverage on Ramon and his pals.”
“Exert leverage. That means blackmail?”
“That means – get them to leave us alone. Give us back our properties.”
“I still have the feeling this isn’t that simple. If they’re the kind of hoodlums you say they are, we’re pr
obably still alive pretty much because of Wendy. Latins rarely exterminate family. Let’s not become the exception. Incidentally, I understand that Wendy is pregnant. That might help.”
“It might help, but it ain’t going to get you back your property.”
“More with the tough-guy talk.” Dad’s bulging eyes were intent, amused. “How would you handle this?”
“Bring an action.” I had thought about this. “Go out of Florida, where these characters obviously have a lot of political backup, and institute a motion for recovery of our real estate within, say, ninety days according to the stipulations in the secondary agreements. They recover your shares in their hedge fund and you get your own stuff back.”
“And this would work?”
“Lawyers do this all the time. Guys on the corporate side at Humper, Fardel spend half their billable hours dissolving bad financial marriages.”
“Then why not do it there?”
“Why not? Now that we’ve got certified copies of the documents.”
The lobster salads we had ordered clattered down in front of us.
Dad tried a forkful, then looked up balefully. “You probably ought to make duplicates of everything you got and give me a set and keep a set in a safe deposit box. The originals would go to Philadelphia.”
“I’ve done all that. Your set is in my briefcase.”
“Oi! Mine Sohn the Vunderkind! Who would have thought?”
“You’re giving me too much credit. Sonny ran the caper. I was the schlepper.”
“Caper, schlepper – you’re turning into a visitor from another planet.” Dad speared a curl of lobster. “How should we deal with him? Sonny?”
